CS:GO Banned a Record Number of Players after its Latest Update


Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s most recent update saw the addition of a Battle Royale style game mode along with the game becoming free to play. This is a clever way to try and get new players for the game. Near the release of the update Counter-Strike: Global Offensive managed to rake in 672,000 concurrent players. This is a massive increase from what it usually has. This has now slipped down as expected but is still performing above what is used to before the free to play update.

Anyone who has played any online fps/tps games knows that there are always going to be hackers and this is especially true in free to play shooter games.

Throughout the month of December there were over 600,000 accounts banned by VAC. VAC is CS:GO’s anti-cheat system and seems to have worked incredibly well. This is almost six times what VAC usually manages to ban. In November 103,000 accounts were banned for hacking.

What is even more impressive is that the number of bans in a month has never got over 200,000 in the 15 years that the game has been out. So to make it triple that is insane.

The fact that the game became free to play made the player base who had previously purchased the game very angry and lead to them review bombing the game. It received over 14,000 negative reviews on the day that it went free to play. Although it wasn’t all bad news for the newly free to play game, there were also 7,000 positive reviews of the game along with the revitalised player base.

Have you been playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive since it went free to play or are you scared that there will be too many hackers? (Even though VAC is doing an incredible job).